Showdown begins as Atiku quits Buhari’s APC ahead of 2019 elections

The jockeying for the 2019 presidency in Nigeria has seen the opening of a major and familiar ambition by former vice President Atiku Abubakar (1999-2007), today Friday morning. In an announcement which he signed, the controversial Atiku said his reason for quitting the ruling party (APC) was due to failure to govern optimally, exclusion of youths, arbitrariness and unconstitutional actions.

According to Atiku who has been severely opposed by former boss, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, “I admit that I and others who accepted the invitation to join the APC were eager to make positive changes for our country that we fell for a mirage. Can you blame us for wanting to put a speedy end to the sufferings of the masses of our people?”

He therefore concluded “after due consultation with my God, my family, my supporters and the Nigerian people whom I meet in all walks of life, I, Atiku Abubakar [Waziri Adamawa] hereby tender my resignation from the All Progressives Congress while I take time to ponder my future…. While other parties have purged themselves of the arbitrariness and unconstitutionality that led to fractionalization, the All Progressives Congress has adopted those same practices and even gone beyond them to institute a regime of a draconian clampdown on all forms of democracy within the party and the government it produced.”

“Only last year, a governor produced by the party wrote a secret memorandum to the president which ended up being leaked. In that memo, he admitted that the All Progressives Congress had not only failed to manage expectations of a populace that

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expected overnight ‘change’ but has failed to deliver even mundane matters of governance.”

“Of the party itself, that same governor said Mr. President, Sir Your relationship with the national leadership of the party, both the formal (NWC) and informal (Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso), and former Governors of ANPP, PDP (that joined us) and ACN, is perceived by most observers to be at best frosty. Many of them are aggrieved due to what they consider total absence of consultations with them on your part and those you have assigned such duties.”

“Since that memorandum was written up until today, nothing has been done to reverse the treatment meted out to those of us invited to join the All Progressives Congress on the strength of a promise that has proven to be false. If anything, those behaviours have actually worsened.”

“But more importantly, the party we put in place has failed and continues to fail our people, especially our young people. How can we have a federal cabinet without even one single youth. A party that does not take the youth into account is a dying party. The future belongs to young people.”

USAfrica notes he was, in the early months of the Buhari presidency, one of the influential figures until he was edged out by the evidently more single-mindedly northern-centric clique working with the knowledge of Buhari. By Chido Nwangwu @Chido247

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